ZOTAC AMP! Edition appearance
ZOTAC sampled HEXUS with its GeForce 9600 GT AMP! Edition for review on launch date. We've taken a look at the range-heading AMP! Editions before, for both the GeForce 8800 GT 512 and GeForce 8800 GTS GPUs. Both have shipped with significantly higher clock-speeds than the reference model.
The same is true here. The card ships with factory-overclocked speeds of 725/1,750/2,000MHz for the core, shader and memories, respectively. Compare that with the 650/1,625/1,800 for stock, as shown on the previous page, and you'll appreciate that it'll benchmark around 10 per cent faster.
The card measures 229 x 111 x 21mm (W x D x H) and weighs in at 469g. Given the 95W board-power rating, the single-slot cooler, which is different from the 8800 GT's, keeps the GPU ticking along without making a racket. Indeed, like practically all mid-range board these days, it's eerily quiet under load.
95W still necessitates an auxillary six-pin power connector, though.
The display-output choices are considerable, but ZOTAC opts for the standard twin dual-link DVI ports. HDMI support is present, too, but the user would need to connect an audio cable from their motherboard's S/PDIF header to the graphics board.
We also noted that present HDMI support is barely functional. The culprit appears to be the driver, ForceWare 174.12, with the picture output rather fuzzy. We've seen this in the past on other ForceWare drivers and expect it to be fixed in a new release. Remember, this is a non-card issue.
